Roy De Forest -- Bay Area painter well-known nationally

Bay Area painter Roy De Forest (1930-2007) with the subject of one of his works of art. Photo courtesy of Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco

Bay Area painter Roy De Forest (1930-2007) with the subject of one of his works of art. Photo courtesy of Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco

Photo: Courtesy Of Brian Gross Fine Art

Photo: Courtesy Of Brian Gross Fine Art

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Bay Area painter Roy De Forest (1930-2007) with the subject of one of his works of art. Photo courtesy of Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco

Bay Area painter Roy De Forest (1930-2007) with the subject of one of his works of art. Photo courtesy of Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco

Photo: Courtesy Of Brian Gross Fine Art

Roy De Forest -- Bay Area painter well-known nationally

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Nationally known Bay Area painter Roy De Forest died on Friday, after a brief illness. He was 77.

The son of migrant farmers, Mr. De Forest was born in North Platte, Neb., in 1930. He lived with his family in Nebraska, Colorado, California and Washington, where he attended junior college, before arriving in San Francisco in 1950 to study at the California School of Fine Arts, which is now the San Francisco Art Institute.

From today's vantage point, Mr. De Forest seems to have been in all the right places at the right times for a Northern California artist of his generation.

The California School of Fine Arts enjoyed a moment of particularly high creative energy at the time he arrived, powered by artistic personalities as dissonant as Clyfford Still, David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn.

The regional style that came to be known as Bay Area Figuration began its coalescence there in the early '50s. But Mr. De Forest took his own tangent early on, digressing from stabs at abstraction into his own vein of folk-art-like images.

His paintings, remarkably consistent in vision across the decades, describe overheated landscapes populated by goofy-looking humans and earnest animals, mainly dogs. World travels -- most recently to the Amazon -- spurred Mr. De Forest's work as did the animals that shared his home in Port Costa. An eye informed by abstraction, but disdainful of the implicit snobbery, guided his painting throughout his career.

In 1953, he completed his undergraduate degree at San Francisco State College, which would later award him a master's degree. In the same year, he showed for the first time at the legendary King Ubu Gallery, progenitor of a San Francisco tradition of artist-run exhibition spaces.

Despite a two-year hiatus for military service, Mr. De Forest soon added to the list of his exhibitions several shows at the seminal Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco.

By 1964, he had entered a long and fruitful relationship with the Frumkin Gallery in New York City, and later with the George Adams Gallery that in many respects succeeded Frumkin.

A decade later, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a midcareer retrospective of Mr. De Forest's work that traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

The Hansen Fuller Gallery in San Francisco represented Mr. De Forest early in his career. Brian Gross Fine Art, which handles his work today, presented his most recent San Francisco show in 2006.

In 1965, Mr. De Forest began teaching at UC Davis, which he continued full time until 1992. He became an influential figure in a high-wattage department that included Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri and Wayne Thiebaud.

Mr. De Forest is survived by his wife of 23 years, Gloria Scott; a daughter and son, Oriana and Pascal, both of Concord; and three sisters, Beverly Lagiss of Livermore, Beth Jacobs of San Leandro, and Lynn Robie of Sacramento.